Infinidat adds smaller footprint G4 arrays with claimed 2x performance

Purveyor of triple-controller all-flash and hybrid flash arrays aimed at high-end customers tails and tops Infinibox and Infinibox SSA ranges, and adds Azure cloud storage to AWS

Antony Adshead,
Storage Editor

Published: 22 May 2024 13:00

Infinidat has added two HDD and flash storage array products – dubbed Infinibox G4 – that claim a 2x performance increase on predecessors by virtue of a switch from Intel to AMD central processing units (CPUs) in their triple-active controllers.

The launch sees the emergence of the Infinibox SSA G4 F1400T series, which brings a small footprint option for edge and smaller datacentre locations, and the InfiniBox G4F4420, which uses 20TB drives to plug a capacity gap in the company’s F4400 series.

InfiniBox G4 uses SAS self-encrypting HDDs in sizes from 4TB to 20TB as backend storage, while InfiniBox SSA G4 uses SAS-connected TLC flash drives up to 16TB. Infinibox SSA G4 comes with 60%, 80% and 100% drive-populated options in contrast to past Infinidat practice, where fully loaded has been the only option.

Also announced by Infinidat was the availability of its InfuzeOS Cloud Edition in the Microsoft Azure cloud, to add to its existing Amazon Web Services (AWS) presence.

Infinidat arrays can be all-flash or hybrid spinning disk and solid state, and are mostly targeted at high-end enterprise and service provider customers. Their hardware products feature triple-active controllers and use of a so-called neural cache that marshals data to the most appropriate media, with the bulk of I/O requests going via very fast DRAM, with a cache hit rate of more than 90% claimed.

The small-footprint F1400T series comes in a 14U form factor with base capacities of 155TB, 310TB and 617TB usable capacity across three models (that’s about 50% of raw capacity).

The series is aimed at colocation, edge storage and smaller datacentres, with effective maximum capacities that go to about 3PB when the F1432T is added at a later date.

Higher capacity

Meanwhile, the Infinibox G4 F4420 adds a higher-capacity model to the existing F4400 series, which has four models in base usable capacities that range from 683TB to 2PB. The Infinibox G4 F4420 takes that to 3.17PB usable.

The new AMD Epyc CPUs used in the G4 generation bring 2x the performance of the previous Intel chips, said chief marketing officer Eric Herzog. That’s courtesy of 64 cores in the CPUs, which is a 31% increase.

“We evaluated the AMD chips and thought it was time to try something different,” he said. “We had to re-factor the OS, but we think we’ll get a 3x to 3.5x performance boost in future.”

Furthermore, Infinidat announced upgrades to its Infiniverse consumption and management console, which gathers data by telemetry on a wide range of storage and compute metrics. Key among the upgrades is the ability to trigger reports on various aspects of storage functionality.

For example, if the customer wanted regular reporting on snapshots, they could get frequent updates, their size, details on immutable snapshots and scheduling. Users currently have to request such reports, but the new functionality will deliver them to a schedule or a trigger.

On the cloud front, Infinidat’s InfuzeOS Cloud Edition is now also available in the Microsoft Azure cloud. To date, it has only been available in AWS. There are no plans to add Google Cloud Platform, said Herzog.

“In Europe and the US, a lot of our big customers use AWS but also Azure, especially in Europe,” he said. “Amazon and Azure are way ahead of Google, so we’re focusing on the two biggest first.”

InfuzeOS Cloud Edition gives customers the same interface as on-premise but without the same storage behind it. Capacity is provided by the cloud in question.

“The interface is the same in the cloud as it is in Infinidat,” said Herzog. “It’s not the same performance, but it’s good for disaster recovery, test and dev, general purpose cloud storage, and backup. It gives standardisation between on-prem and the cloud.”

Last year, Infinidat launched SSA Express for its HD-based arrays. SSA Express allows the customer to use part of the SSD cache layer to provide all-flash performance for some small workloads.

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